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A majority of Torontonians now identify themselves as visible minorities

And in five of the suburban cities around Toronto — Ajax, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Brampton and Markham — a majority of people identify as visible minorities.

The cultural diversity of Canada and Toronto is changing. The majority of Toronto residents are now people who identify as visible minorities. Toronto Star reporter Alex Ballingall breaks down some of the numbers in newly released data from the 2016 census report. (Toronto Star)

OTTAWA—Most people in Canada’s biggest city now identify as visible minorities, as new census data shows increasing diversity in Toronto and many of its neighbouring suburban areas.

More than half of respondents to the 2016 census in the City of Toronto — 51.5 per cent — said they’re from visible minority communities, a milestone that was narrowly missed when 49 per cent identified that way in 2011.

The news comes as part of a tranche of census data, released Wednesday, that paints a multifaceted portrait of a country where more than one in five people was born outside its borders. Canada is now home to millions of people who claim more than 250 distinct “ethnic origins,” with historical lineages through Indigenous groups and countries all over the world.

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“We’ve been seeing this for 20 years now, that Canada is becoming more and more diverse,” said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, Statistics Canada’s assistant director of social and Aboriginal statistics.

“It’s not surprising that we see the share of people identified as visible minorities… increasing for sure,” he said.

In Toronto, 51.5 per cent of respondents to the 2016 census said they are from visible minority communities. Five years earlier in 2011, the number was 49 per cent. (RENE JOHNSTON / TORONTO STAR) | ORDER THIS PHOTO

Across the GTA, almost half (48.8) per cent of census respondents identified as visible minorities.

Almost 22 per cent of the Canadian population is foreign-born, while 1.2 million people immigrated here between 2011 and 2016, the census data shows. Forty-one per cent of Canadians, meanwhile, lay claim to more than a single ancestral group, the most frequent being English, Scottish, French or Irish.

In Canada overall, more than 22 per cent of people reported in 2016 being from visible minority communities, up from 16.3 per cent in 2006 and 4.7 per cent when the government started gathering this information in 1981. Statistics Canada attributes the increase in part to an increasing proportion of immigrants from non-European countries. For example, Africa surpassed Europe as the continent-of-origin for the second-highest number of immigrants between 2011 and 2016, the data shows.

The release showed a similar trend for two groups: the largest overall increase in the Indigenous population was in western Canada over the last decade, while the share of recent immigrants to the Prairies more than doubled over the last 15 years.

“Immigrants are diffusing across the country,” said Michael Haan, a sociology professor at Western University in London, Ont.

“What it’s forcing us to do, collectively, is think about our entire nation as being composed of immigrants, rather than just major cities.”

Nearly half of major metropolitan areas are comprised of visible minorities, noticeably Toronto and Vancouver, said Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics. But the figures are also on the rise in places such as Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg and Calgary, he added.

“Places that people didn’t think were culturally diverse are becoming now culturally diverse.”

The release is just the latest — and second-to-last — in a year-long series of statistical snapshots of Canada. It also marks the return of the long-form census for the first time in a decade.

The data also shows a marked difference in diversity between the multicultural heartland of the Greater Toronto Area and the rest of the country. Twenty-nine per cent of Ontarians and 22 per cent of Canadians overall reported being visible minorities, versus a thin majority in the Big Smoke.

Five of the suburban cities around Toronto — Ajax, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Brampton and Markham — had majorities of people who identify as visible minorities. Markham posted the highest proportion (77.9 per cent), followed by Brampton (73.3 per cent) and Richmond Hill (60 per cent).

But while diversity — in terms of visible minority populations — increased in every census division in the GTA from 2011 to 2016, the numbers vary widely. Burlington and Oshawa had the lowest proportion of visible minorities for cities with more than 100,000 people, at 16 per cent each in 2016, followed by Whitby at 25 per cent and Oakville at 31.

The numbers also varied in the City of Toronto. The higher proportions of diversity — more than 50 per cent — were clumped in the inner suburbs of Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke.

Several areas showed proportions of visible minority communities as high as 90 per cent, with concentrations of people who identified as Chinese, for example, in places such as Scarborough’s Agincourt neighbourhood and the city of Markham. Two neighbouring Toronto census tracts with almost 4,000 residents off Steeles Ave. E. even showed a combined 99 per cent Chinese population, one of the highest proportions of a single visible minority in the GTA.

Minorities in the GTA:

More than half of 2016 census respondents in Toronto — 51.5 per cent — said they’re from visible minority communities: Here’s how the numbers break down:

South Asian: 12.59 per cent

Chinese: 11.13 per cent

Black: 8.91 per cent

Filipino: 5.67 per cent

Latin American: 2.87 per cent

Arab: 1.34 per cent

Southeast Asian: 1.55 per cent

West Asian: 2.24 per cent

Korean: 1.55 per cent

Japanese: 0.5 per cent

Visible minorities not included elsewhere: 1.37 per cent

Multiple visible minorities (people who belong to more than one group): 1.77 per cent

In Canada overall, the largest visible minority communities were South Asian (1.9 million people), Chinese (1.6 million) and Black (1.2 million).

With files from The Canadian Press

* This story has been corrected from an earlier version. The figure of people in the GTA who identify as visible minorities does not include those who identify as Aboriginal.*

New Canadian census data reveals the term “visible minority” has become virtually meaningless across Metro Vancouver, where whites have become the minority by a slight degree.

The region’s five largest municipalities now have significantly fewer whites than people of colour, which means Caucasians are a “visible minority” in Richmond, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam and the city of Vancouver.

The 2016 Canadian census data on ethnicity and immigration, released Wednesday, also shows the foreign-born population of Metro Vancouver has risen to 44 per cent, led by people from China, India and the Philippines.

The fastest-growing cohort of foreign-born residents in Canada, meanwhile, is made up of international students and temporary foreign workers, who now comprise more than 77,000 of Metro Vancouver’s population of 2.4 million, according to the census.

Across all of Canada the foreign-born population hit 22 per cent in 2016. That’s the highest proportion of foreign-born residents in Canada since 1921, when most immigrants came from Europe. Now 62 per cent of immigrants hail from Asia.

However, regional differences are crucial to understanding the story of immigration in Canada, which, along with Australia, takes in the world’s highest per capita rate of newcomers.

The 2016 Census shows Caucasians are the ‘visible minority’ in Richmond, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam and the city of Vancouver. as well as Greater Toronto. (PHOTO – A woman sports a maple leaf at the Canada Day celebrations at Canada Place, Vancouver.)GERRY KAHRMANN / PNG

The census shows almost two of three immigrants to Canada move to Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal (even while there has been a modest shift in the past five years to the Prairies).

In Metro Vancouver and other Canadian cities the dramatic rise of both foreign-born residents, and the expansion of various ethnic groups, has had political implications.

Even though federal immigration policy is developed on a national basis, the fact most immigrants choose the country’s three biggest cities creates local infrastructure challenges — particularly in regards to jobs, English-as-a-second-language programs, transit use and rent and housing.

Various studies have shown immigrants are increasingly struggling financially and at learning English or French, while tending to use urban transit more than domestic-born residents and buying houses at a higher rate than the Canadian-born. Meanwhile, the rapidly rising cohort of foreign students rely heavily on rental housing.

Since the strong majority of newcomers to Canada are from Asia, it explains those cities’ large proportion of people of colour, many of whom are second generation.

Across Canada, according to the census, the visible minority population has reached 7.7 million, or 22.3 per cent of the population. That’s seven times the number reported in 1981.

Both Vancouver and Toronto are known for the way people of different ethnic backgrounds are able to coexist with a minimum of tension, at least compared to more rivalrous regions of the world.

And that will continue to be important, because, as a result of migration flows, Greater Toronto now has fewer whites and aboriginals (48.6 per cent) than “visible minorities” (51.4 per cent).

Metro Vancouver is basically in the same boat as Toronto, with virtually equal numbers of whites compared to visible minorities (which is the term employed by Statistics Canada, while Americans tend to use “people of colour”).

The 2016 census shows that 51.1 per cent of the population of Metro Vancouver is “non-visible minority,” which means it’s either Caucasian or aboriginal.

The proportion that is a visible minority has jumped to 48.9 per cent, from 45.2 per cent in 2011.

Since 2.5 per cent of the population of Metro Vancouver is aboriginal, however, it means the white population of Metro Vancouver is actually 48.6 per cent, a minority.

The largest visible-minority groups in Metro Vancouver, by far, are people of Chinese, South Asian and Filipino ancestry.

On a municipality-by-municipality basis in Metro Vancouver, Caucasians and aboriginals now account for fewer than one out of four residents of Richmond, B.C. (23.7 per cent).

Canada’s big-city mayors complain of having no influence over the federal government’s immigration policies, even though they have to deal with most infrastructure challenges.ARLEN REDEKOP / PNG

Whites and aboriginals have also declined to 36.4 per cent of the residents of Burnaby, 42.5 per cent of the population of Surrey, 48.4 per cent of the residents of the city of Vancouver and 49.8 per cent of those who live in Coquitlam.

Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research, who has been conducting polls on Canada’s contentious migration issues, says increasing immigration rates appear, generally, to be “softening” Canadians’ attitudes to ethnic diversity.

At the same time, Graves said, polling shows a portion of Canadians have a negative attitude toward high immigration. They’re the people, Graves said, who are “more economically vulnerable.”

The census results on immigration came out a week before the federal Liberals release their new immigration targets, on Nov. 1.

The federal NDP wants immigration rates raised further. But the Conservatives have urged the Liberals to find better ways to find good jobs for Canadian-born residents, match immigrants to regional skill shortages and to influence more newcomers to move to smaller population centres.

(NOTE: Statistics Canada uses the term “non-visible minority” to describe whites and aboriginals, as a group. Even though journalists are rigorously taught to avoid using jargon and double-speak, most journalists in Canada, unlike elsewhere, continue to use the bureaucratic, obfuscating term, “non-visible minority.”)

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I am Chairman Kevin R. Goudreau of the Canadian Nationalist Front. I am a veteran activist of the Nationalist Movement for over 20 years. We are here to educate, inspire and organize activists who are awake and ethnically aware. We encourage letter writing campaigns, handing out literature, protesting, marching, networking on the internet, logistical support and above all working together with other Nationalist organizations. We must stand together and make a stand for Our Heritage! Our Homeland! Join the Canadian Nationalist Front today!